Storagezilla

Palm and Porsche

Neither of which have anything to do with the other beyond being in this blog post but never mind that. What's interesting about Palm could be summed up in headline "Palm deliver pretty good phone shocker!"

The phone I'm talking about is the Palm Centro and was turfed onto a table in front of me recently as someone rummaged through her handbag looking for something else. Yes the camera is poor, the Garnet edition of the Palm OS is prehistoric and the screen is recessed which is a dumb decision for a touch screen of that size but when it's all put together it just comes across as being right.

Yes Garnet is awful but after picking it up a Palm OS device for the first time in years I quickly remembered how fast Garnet is in comparison to Symbian or Windows Mobile. Don't bother with iPhone comparisons this budget priced device doesn't even try to compare with Steve Jobs latest customer gauging offering but taken as the budget device that it is it's impressive.

Would I buy one myself? Hell no. At this stage I'm Symbian to the bone which means it's bulky Nokia handsets designed by someone with a set square and a drafting pencil for me but I'd consider it as a gift for a teenager or a young woman.

As per usual with Palm devices it's US exclusive at the moment they'll need to get it out into Europe ASAP if they want to stand a chance competing in the budget segment.

Moving on to Porsche The Sunday Times has a great article on Porsche AG CEO Wendelin Wiedeking.

Once Wiedeking was in the driving seat he revived the 911 and set about developing the Boxster. Indeed, his love of the 911 neatly dovetailed into his family life. His favourite model is the 911 Carerra. And it just so happened that his two small children fitted snugly into the rear jump seats. And his development of the rear spoiler served brilliantly as a dual-purpose cooler and nappy-changing table.

“The story is true,” he said. “The spoiler was the perfect place to change the children and it was warm, too. The children enjoyed it.”

Wiedeking for those who haven't heard of him is hardcore. Not only capable of generating new ideas he expects his bad ones to be gutted by his staff before they do any damage. Somewhat refreshing in a world where people who've slimed their way up the corporate structure will tell their superiors that they're wearing that piece of toilet tissue attached to the bottom of their shoe quite well today.

That's if they mention it at all.

He admits to being impatient and getting rid of anyone who has doubts about a project once a decision is made. The fastest way people can get shown the door in Wiedeking’s presence is to boast about their single-figure golf handicap. “He can’t be spending much time at work,” said Wiedeking.

Letterman comes back first

David Letterman's Worldwide Pants production company has signed a deal with the Writers Guild to go back into production, Letterman's writing staff returning to work immediately. The cash flush Worldwide Pants (It also owns Everybody Loves Raymond a show that'll run in syndication forever), has signed up to the Writers Guild Minimum Basic Agreement making it the first production company to do so.

Now this is a thin line that the guild is walking as there are going to be sections of their membership which will take a one out all out view of the strike. On the upside though while this doesn't represent a crack in AMPTP dam since Letterman has always thumbed his nose at it's membership it does give other production outfits the opportunity to deal individually by setting a precedent.

I'm sure CBS president Les Moonves will sanction some AMPTP flack to complain on CBS's behalf about this in public but in his office high atop Black Rock he has to be looking at NBC and ABC and laughing. Letterman owns his show, all the other guys shows are owned by the networks which air them. It won't be a trivial deal for them to come back with writers.

Regardless this entire thing needs to come a resolution soon as the 08 TV lineup is starting to look like it's been directly lifted from VH1.

That is not a good thing.

Blade Runner

More than 18 months in and the HD format war isn't all it's cracked up to be.

I bought both formats, you like movies it's just something you have to do and you'll end up buying everything all over again when we move beyond shiny discs anyway, but what's interesting is that it's not really an image quality thing it's a raw storage capacity thing.

Yes Blu-ray and HD DVD movies look better than standard definition DVD movies but they don't look an order of magnitude better. This isn't as dramatic a quality improvement like we had when we moved from VHS to DVD. Once you upscale DVDs with a good quality transfer to 1080p the gap closes even more.

And then came Blade Runner..

Having abused the movie in nearly all it's incarnations over the past 25 years someone at Warner's decided that nothing less than a full restoration was required for the HD version and it's not just impressive it's stunning. It's also very clever. Looking at the scale of the clean up job you notice grain here and there they should have been able to remove easily but then you look at the shot and realise that had they removed these analogue flaws in the film stock it would actually detract from the viewing experience.

The end result is that you're watching a movie which shows it's age but looks as spry as it did the day it was released in the cinema.

Beyond the movie itself DVDs usually come with special features. These for the most part are dreadful wastes of time and nothing more than publicity filler which should be aired on the E! Network in between Ryan Seacrest appearances and episodes of True Hollywood Story. Sit through enough of these features and they'll brain wash you to the extent that you could be convinced that the latest Lindsay Lohan flick should win every Oscar.

After 25 years of seasoning and a rep built by it's fanbase Blade Runner does away with the how great we are docuverts and gives you all the significant cuts of the movie and hours upon hours of commentary.

All in all it's an impressive package, as a viewing experience on a HDTV with quality sound it's epic.

Verdict: Highly Recommended.

Toigo responds

Awwhh! Poor Jon gets his image editing underoos in a twist.

Now here's Toigo's trick. When he's being insulting, offensive, misleading or just downright wrong he calls it a "parody" or states that he's being "satirical" but the rest of us well we're just being uncivil.

Sorry Jon your parody/satire defence days are over. You crossed the line over into being insulting a long while back and from here on in you're going to be treated like the Troll you behave as anytime the mood takes me.

When you're ready to have a real conversation, in the blogging sense not that one way soap box you've been standing on for a while now, go for it. Until then you're just the arrogant loudmouth spouting every ignorant opinion that comes into your head.

But chin up it's a role you play quite well.

See you in 08 big guy. It's going to be a really fun year!

Microsoft: Don't save files to Windows Home Server

Microsoft's home NAS initiative has hit a bit of a snag, specifically data corruption when you save files to their NAS OS. Which when you think of it this completely defeats the point of Windows Home Server.

I don't even have a joke for this one. It gets the laughs all on it's own.

Movie rentals coming to iTunes..

..and Apple's FairPlay DRM scheme coming to the FOX DVDs.

On rumbles iTunes probably the most successful piece of software Apple has ever released besides QuickTime.

The Digital Music Player market looks increasingly depressing. It's like everyone else has just given up on trying to compete against the iPod/iTunes Music Store combo. Sony used to own the music player market from top to bottom with the Walkman/Discman lines but botched the move to digital by paying too much attention to their backward looking music division.

In this market when you're dead you stay dead as their relaunched Walkman line of digital audio products are less than inspiring.

In other news it looks like Santa brought Mark Lewis another piece for his Content Management and Archiving train set with the acquisition of Document Sciences. Just when I thought PacMan would get a seasonal holiday I end up putting him on active duty.

Roll on 2008. 

The not so mobile Internet

I'm not sure how it is in the US but here in Europe there's an entire generation who do everything with their mobile phones. Since I can't be near a WiFi hotspot all the time I'd just started looking at data plans for my N95 (Moving the voice only work SIM into a piece of brain dead plastic I can leave powered off in a drawer when not at work), when I fired out a question about data plans from the various carriers in Ireland.

Conor O'Neill is less than impressed with the Internet service available from mobile communications giant Vodafone.

One development cycle

It comes up time and again how the Cloud Computing giants have been designing and building their own speciality components to suit their unique needs. It doesn't matter if it's Google or Amazon building their own switches/compute power/storage architectures it's always heralded as "The end" for traditional vendors.

That of course is nonsense, it ignores history and doesn't reflect reality.

We had the same thing going on during the dawn of the Telco market with those providers doing everything in house (Complete vertical integration) as there was no one building gear capable of meeting their requirements. The market grew and vendors provided more cost effective solutions than in house design/assembly/support because these new products were designed to address the specific needs. In 2008 we're going to see the same thing start to happen for the wannabe Amazon Web Services or Googles of the world. Why then? Because it takes a full development cycle to embrace a major new idea and deliver a suitable product to the market.

It's the same with Green technologies. There have been piecemeal efforts to date, usually bolted on to existing systems, but after a full development cycle the green requirement will have been part of the design of the product from day one and not an after thought.

Look at network switches. It doesn't matter if I'm sending a single packet or I'm flooding the switch the number of watts dissipated remains the same. One design cycle later we'll see switches with power saving functionality designed in.

For some vendors 2008 marks the end of a development cycle lets see what answers they've worked on providing.

Toigo channels Coulter

Ann Coulter that is and had he posted the full image I'd never have written this entry.

Now usually I don't pay too much attention to notoriously thin skinned buffoon Jon Toigo but after Tony Pearson happily jumped on his bandwagon (No one cares about the DR 550 Tony but at least you took the shot) I was left with a question.

Why did he edit out the 627x544 pixel ad for EMC/IBM/HDS/NetApp used hardware reseller The Hardware Exchange who put the item on offer?

I suppose it wouldn't fit with his regular Centera bashing story. Nor would the other Centera listed there which was never unboxed due to Centera overlap when one Centera customer acquired another Centera customer and already had a replication target in place.

See how that works? Sell a lot of Centeras and some of them will find their way into the reseller market. It's the same with any product which leads it's market and EMC has sold a hell of a lot more CAS than anyone else.

Now what really made me laugh was the following.

>Click to see the ad in its full glory.

But of course you can't since he's posted a heavily edited image stripping away the context. While he might have blacked out the sellers name he made the amateurish mistake of leaving the item number intact (120197952189) so for completeness here's the link he didn't provide devoid of his butchery.

If you want the item then buy it as at that price you're getting a hell of a bargain. Toigo will tell you otherwise but judging from his anti-VMware ranting at Storage Decisions (Like Centera he was years late in "discovering" VMware too) it's clear he's just the industry equivalent of the crazy person you see yelling on street corners because they enjoy the sound of their own voice.

Jon, I look forward to ignoring your next out of touch puff piece filled with ads for your buddies along with the usual rant about how tape, optical and the Mainframe are the wave of the future.

And Merry Christmas 1987 to you too.

Akamai chief joins EMC board

This is more important than it looks.

The only thing soft about Sagan are his teeth and he puts the fear of god into CDN competitors to the extent that they hold their breath when he breezes through a room.

You think I'm joking? I've seen people turn blue.

How did Akamai solidify market dominance in the CDN business, pump profits and boost the stock price?

-Paul Sagan.